To celebrate the publication of a Spanish-language translation Margaret Sanger’s Family Limitation’s in Merida, Mexico, her grandson Alexander Sanger wrote the following new introduction:La brújula del hogar

“In the summer and fall of 1914, my grandmother, Margaret Sanger, nascent birth control advocate and a public health nurse in New York, wrote a pamphlet entitled, Family Limitation, in which she described various methods of contraception which she recommended to enable couples to plan, space and limit their children. It was this pamphlet that was translated into Spanish as La Brujula del Hogar and published in Merida in 1922.
My grandmother, a mother of three, knew what she was talking about, not just because she had only three children, but because she had been working in the poorest slums of New York City, taking care of mothers who had children they did not want and could not afford. She often talked of one patient, Sadie Sachs, who in 1912 went to a back alley abortionist and almost died in the attempt. My grandmother nursed her back to health. When the doctor made his final visit, Sadie Sachs asked what she could do to not have any more children. The doctor responded,”“So you want to have your cake and eat it too. The answer is, tell Jake (her husband) to sleep on the roof.’”

“Three months later, Sadie Sachs was pregnant again, went to a back alley abortionist and died in my grandmother’s arms.”

“My grandmother said, ‘Enough.’”

“She went to Europe to research contraceptive methods and put all her knowledge of methods available in the United States and in Europe into Family Limitation.”

“In the United States at that time, both the Federal Government and the states had Comstock Laws, which prohibited the dissemination of birth control information and supplies. The laws also criminalized advocating the legality of birth control.”

“In March of 1914, my grandmother announced in the first issue of her monthly newspaper, The Woman Rebel, her intention to ‘advocate the prevention of conception’ and ‘impart such knowledge in the columns of this paper.’ She never actually imparted any contraceptive information in The Woman Rebel, but nonetheless the authorities confiscated the newspaper. In it she first used the phrase ‘birth control.’ My grandmother kept printing the paper and the government kept confiscating it, and finally indicted her on obscenity charges, since birth control under the Comstock laws was considered ‘obscene.’”

“The indictment made headlines, spreading birth control far beyond the limited readership of her paper and agitating women and men to support her cause.”

“She decided to ‘give them (the government) something to really indict me on,’ she wrote to her muckraker friend, Upton Sinclair. She printed 100,000 copies of Family Limitation. It was immediately translated into multiple languages, including in 1919 and again in 1922 into Spanish. Her willingness to put women’s rights and health above the law launched the United States birth control movement, and soon the worldwide movement.”

“What my grandmother saw in the slums of New York and on her visits to Mexico (she made at least a half dozen), was enormous inequality between the classes. In New York and in poorer areas of the United States, the rich and poor often lived near each other but had vastly different incomes, access to health care and numbers of children, both born and surviving. There were scandalously high infant and maternal mortality rates. If women used contraception, it was a traditional method, often ineffective if not dangerous, and when it failed, the women often resorted to unsafe abortion. There were Sadie Saches in Mexico as well as New York, and my grandmother vowed to put an end to it. In her campaign she was repeatedly imprisoned but she never wavered.”

“Imprisonment also seemed likely for the translators, printers and publishers of La Brujula del Hogar in 1922. The pamphlet fell into the hands of birth control opponents in Merida, the Knights of Columbus, who drew up a petition seeking the prosecution of the publishers. Newspapers took both sides, cartoonists got busy, public became aroused and Birth Control became the most discussed topic of the hour. The first edition of the pamphlet, all 5,000 copies, was exhausted in one day, and a second edition of 10,000 copies was immediately re-printed.”

“The Knights of Columbus petition was forwarded on from the District Attorney, Arturo Cisneros Canto, to the Governor of Yucatan, Felipe Carrillo Puerto, who at once remitted instructions to refuse it. Incidentally, Carrillo, a Socialist, was one of 14 children. In compliance, District Attorney Canto issued a statement published in the March 14 Diario Official, which was reprinted in Meridá newspapers, which said, in part:”

“The Attorney General’s Office cannot shape its manner of proceedings to the narrow-minded and antiquated criteria of morality, the result of deep-rooted religious prejudices, which crops out in your petition. The Executive of the State wishes to have it made clear that forever have gone the prosecutions, which have no other cause than moral fanaticism, which filled with horror the vast period of clerical domination of the Middle Ages. As long as the present socialist government directs public destiny, the Attorney General’s office will not undertake any prosecutions for futile ideas of morality, since prosecutions in the name of morality have at all times been the most odious pretext of which religion made use so as to destroy its enemies.”

“My grandmother touted the Yucatan government’s support of birth control, noting that Arturo Cisneros Canto’s statement’“is a remarkable document and one that might be recommended to the attention of police departments in some American cities–especially in New York, where a meeting for the discussion of the morality of birth control was broken up not six months ago.’”

“The Yucatan’s socialist experiment was short-lived. In 1924 Governor Carrillo Puerto was assassinated, and support for feminist and socialist reforms there evaporated. But, as historian Dan La Botz noted, ‘revolutionary Yucatan set the long-term agenda of the Mexican women’s movement, and many of its demands are still being fought for.’”

On June 30 and July 1, 1916, newspapers across the country publicized Margaret Sanger’s arrest in Portland on June 29. Along with Sanger, Dr. Marie Equi, Mrs. Florence A. Greatwood, and Maude Bonner were also arrested, and the papers noted that “several other women clamored to be arrested on the same charge.” The meeting itself had attracted a substantial crowd. Bail was set at $25, but Mrs. Greatwood was the only one who accepted it. The other three women spent the night in jail and remained there on June 30, pending a hearing. After conferring with a lawyer, the women decided to demand a jury trial.

Sanger had held a protest meeting on June 29 because three workers, Carl Rave, Ralph Chervin, and E. L. Jenkins, had been arrested for selling her birth control pamphlet, Family Limitation, on June 19. As a result, the City Council declared on June 23 that Family Limitation was obscene in order to prohibit further distribution. The trial of the three men was postponed in order to allow Sanger to finish her speaking tour before going back to Portland to act as an expert witness. She returned to find her pamphlet outlawed and Portland women passing out leaflets saying, “Shall five men legislate in secret against ten thousand women?”

The two cases — that of the three men and that of the four women — were tried together on July 1. The Deputy City Attorney argued for the prosecution that “the evidence shows that these circulars, or pamphlets, were distributed promiscuously at the meetings held… These pamphlets should not be circulated here or anywhere else!”

The attorney for the defense, Isaac Swett, compared Family Limitation to another book purchased that very morning at a bookstore, stating that in that book, there was “language much clearer, much more shocking, to persons unaccustomed to it, than can be found in the pamphlet!” He argued that the language of Sanger’s pamphlet was specifically chosen to avoid misunderstandings by women unaccustomed to reading about such topics and was in “the best interests of humanity.” The article about the trial in the Sunday Oregonian on July 2 noted that, following Swett’s defense, “the clerk’s gavel abruptly checked the impetuous patter of feminine hand-clapping.”

Swett was assisted by Colonel C. E. S. Wood, who argued that the definition of “obscenity” in literature was utterly arbitrary. If Sanger’s pamphlet was to be banned as obscene, he said, parts of the Old Testament were also obscene and thus the Bible would need to be banned, and so would the works of Rabelais, both of which he could go and buy at any bookstore. He closed on an impassioned statement: “I say it with regret, we’re a backwoods town. We’re the only town in the country that’s doing this thing. I know, and your honor knows, that this has come to stay!”

Judge Langguth postponed his decision until Friday, July 7. On July 5, the Morning Oregonian invited the public to a “Margaret Sanger rally” to be held at the Spiritualist Temple, with several speakers, including Sanger herself. The following day, a lengthy article covered the meeting, at which Dr. Chapman bemoaned Portland’s “medieval, inquisitorial, petty-minded mediocrities” of city officials. Sanger argued that “if two people behave at all in the marriage relation, they must have knowledge of the methods of preventive of conception.” And, of course, before the police “moral squad” arrived, copies of Family Limitation were for sale to attendees.

On July 7, Judge Langguth found the defendants guilty of distributing obscene and indecent material. His decision rested on the “assumption that matter not necessarily obscene when offered for sale in bookstores, or for use in medical clinics, becomes obscene when circulated publicly if it is of a nature calculated to excite lascivious thought in youthful minds,” according to the Morning Oregonian’s coverage. The men were fined $10 each but not required to pay, and the women were not fined at all.

Margaret Sanger responded to the decision:

“I consider it a cowardly decision. It was painful, really, to listen to a man of his intelligence crawling verbally, and he crawled. It’s practically the same old story, that knowledge, if it’s hidden away on musty bookshelves or in the narrow confines of the medical profession, is moral; but as soon as it is distributed among the working people the same book becomes obscene. It is the same decision that has been handed down from the days of witchcraft. It is disappointing that in this 20th century, in the day of electricity and modern scientific triumphs, the judicial mind is in the same groove.”

Later, in her 1938 Autobiography, Sanger noted that “the papers made a great to-do about the affair but it was not a type of publicity of my choosing and did little to bring the goal nearer.” However, the publicity did lead to an increase in demand for copies of Family Limitation.

Marie Equi

Dr. Marie Equi, who was also arrested, met Sanger in Portland earlier in 1916 and helped her to revise Family Limitation. In addition to her work as a physician and providing abortions, she was active in the radical labor movement and the women’s suffrage movement, as well as fighting for protective legislation for women and children.

For news coverage of the events of June and July 1916, see, among others, “Book Sale Stopped: Council Act Brands Mrs. Sanger’s Pamphlet as Obscene, Criticism Induces Action,” The Morning Oregonian, Portland, OR, June 24, 1916; “Mrs. Sanger Arrested, Three Other Women Also Held for Holding Meeting of Protest,” Altoona Mirror, June 30, 1916; “Mrs. Sanger Arrested,” The Morning Echo, Bakersfield, CA, July 1, 1916;“Sanger Cases are Now Up to Court: Concluding Arguments Compare Book with Others to be Found on Sale, Law Declared Absurd,” The Sunday Oregonian, July 2, 1916; “Margaret Sanger Rally is Tonight,” The Morning Oregonian, July 5, 1916; “Officials are Hit: Sanger Protest Meeting Brings Roast for Mayor, Others Called Names,” The Morning Oregonian, July 6, 1916; and “Mrs. Sanger’s Book Declared Obscene,” The Morning Oregonian, July 8, 1916. On Dr. Marie Equi, see “Changing the Face of Medicine: Dr. Marie Diana Equi,” at the U.S. National Library of Medicine. Also see MS’ article in The Malthusian, September 1916, pp. 83-84, MSM S1:638-640, and MS’ Autobiography. For a summary of Sanger’s eventful 1916 tour, see Sanger, “A Birth Control Lecture Tour,” Aug. 6, 1916.

Like this:

LikeLoading...

How you can help

The Sanger Papers is a non-profit organization (501(c)3), hosted by New York University. Almost all project expenses are covered by grants and private donations. For more information, see our website, or make a donation online today!